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He stared at her like she was insane.
‘Sorry. Forgot who I was talking to.’ James put the extra pinch in penny-pincher. His guilt must have been overwhelming to splurge on a coffee and croissant.
‘Better drink up,’ he said. ‘They’ll be here soon. Are you nervous?’ His direct blue-eyed gaze didn’t leave her face.
She sipped, considering his question. Was she nervous? She used to dream about getting this chance. Now part of her wished she was just a trainee architect again. It wouldn’t be so bad doing CAD drawings and photocopying floor plans for the next thirty-five years, right?
Yeah right. Like she’d give up this chance after working her arse off.
‘Why should I be nervous? It’s only our careers on the line,’ she said as the takeaway cup shook slightly in her hand.
He noticed, and put his hand over hers. ‘You absolutely definitely shouldn’t be nervous. You’re going to be great. We both are. We can go through the presentation again if you want?’
They both glanced at her screen. A skyscraper screen saver hid their slides. ‘No need. I know it better than the national anthem.’
‘You’re a star.’ James smiled as he strolled back to his office humming “God Save the Queen”.
The second he rounded the corner she went back to the presentation. They might be friends but she wasn’t about to let a chocolate croissant make her forget that they were also rivals.
* * *
She’d just about got her flipping tummy under control by the time he came back with his suit jacket on. ‘Ready?’ He pulled at his buttoned-up collar and straightened his tie.
She gurned at him. ‘How’re my teeth?’ On account of the big gap between the two front ones, she always checked.
‘Clear. Mine?’
‘There’s something brown in there.’ Rachel pointed as he snapped his lips shut.
Panicked, he took a swig from the mineral water on her desk. ‘Better now?’
‘It looks like … no, must be something stuck in there from all the arse-kissing you’ve been doing.’
‘Really, Rachel?’ he said. ‘You want to joke right now? My arse-kissing got us this meeting, and it’s not over yet. Get ready to pucker up.’
She tried to smile as they walked into the conference room but her lips started quivering when she saw her boss making small talk with their most important clients.
Get a grip, Rachel. As far as they’re concerned you’re perfectly at ease. They don’t know that you’ve aged in dog years or restarted your nail-biting habit over the presentation. They can’t see the uncomfortable crotch hammock that your too-yellow tights are making under your dress.
She took a deep breath, resisting the urge to plunge her hand down the back of her tights to make adjustments.
‘Ah, Rachel, James, hello.’ Their boss stood up when he saw them. ‘Gentlemen, allow me to introduce Rachel Lambert and James McCormack, two of our brightest young architects. I think you’re going to love what they’ve come up with.’
His expression warned them not to prove him wrong.
After work, Sarah yanked open the front door before Rachel could get her key out of the lock. Then she nearly wrestled her to the sofa.
‘Ace, you’re home! Let me take that for you!’ She grabbed Rachel’s giant portfolio case.
‘What are you doing?’ Rachel protested as Sarah wrenched off one of her brogues. In her tiny hands the shoe looked huge and inelegant.
‘You’ve had a hard day, so you need to relax.’
‘And this mugging is supposed to relax me?’
Sarah looked surprised by the shoe in her hand. ‘I want you to put your feet up and I’ll cook for us.’
Rachel grinned at her sweet, impulsive housemate. ‘Thank you. Can I have my shoe back please?’
‘Catherine’s just changing. Dinner’s ready soon.’
Sarah retreated to the kitchen with the shoe still in her hand.
‘Do I have to stay here on the sofa?’ Rachel called. ‘Or am I allowed in the kitchen?’
Slowly she rolled her shoulders, feeling the satisfying tick tick tick of her vertebrae cracking away the tension of the past few weeks.
‘Have you been grounded or something?’ Catherine said as she came downstairs from her bedroom.
‘Sarah stole my shoe.’
Catherine didn’t look surprised. ‘How’d it go today?’
Rachel couldn’t wipe the smile off her face.
‘That good, eh?’
‘Remember the time I got that flight to Prague for twenty-nine pounds? And the hotel lost my reservation and gave me a suite for the price of a double? Today was better. Seriously, I rocked it! The clients loved our pitch. They made all the right noises about letting us present our ideas. I think they’re going to give us a chance.’
She didn’t need to tell Catherine that her design would be competing against James’s. It was all she’d rabbited on about lately.
‘Well done, I knew they’d love it!’ Catherine scooped her up in a hug. ‘You’ve told your mum?’
Rachel’s face felt like it might split in two. ‘She rang me back right after the meeting. She thinks I’m awesome.’
Catherine squeezed her again. ‘She’s always been the president of your fan club.’
‘I know.’ She sat back down, resting her head on the back of the sofa and listening to Sarah mangle pop songs at the top of her voice in the kitchen. As much as she loved going out, these rare nights home were bliss. Their rambling, derelict house was the anchor that held them all steady in London.
Or maybe it just seemed like that. She vaguely remembered the same feeling in Catherine’s old flat. Which meant it wasn’t really the house, but the housemates. They might not spend all their time together like they did in the early days, but she couldn’t imagine her life without them.
It was only because of Catherine’s extra mortgage that they’d met at all. She’d sunk so much money into the new matchmaking business that she’d needed flatmates to help pay back the loan. Rachel and Sarah had been the first two to answer her advert. Rachel was only a junior architect then, who still went home to her parents’ every week for dinner and clean laundry. And Sarah was fresh from uni. That was seven years ago.
And now they had the Clapton house. It had taken blood, sweat and tears to get the money together to buy it at auction. Rachel still cried sometimes, looking at her meagre savings account, but it was an excellent long-term financial decision. Assuming it didn’t actually fall down. As the resident architect, she was the one who had to make sure that didn’t happen.
‘Richard is getting married,’ Catherine said, pulling her from her reverie.
‘No way. Who’d have him?’
‘The Hungarian teenager. He wants me to have dinner with them.’
‘Why? Is he looking for a grown-up’s approval?’
Catherine didn’t smile. Rachel always thought that her serious face was her most beautiful. Although that was like choosing which of Thornton’s Decadently Dark chocolates she preferred. All of them, obviously.
‘What’s this mean for you and him?’
‘As long as nothing changes then it doesn’t mean anything.’
Rachel could see Catherine retreating from her feelings. She rarely went off-kilter. You could detonate a bomb beside her and she’d carry on as normal. Maybe that’s what Richard did with his news.
‘You’re sure about that?’ Rachel asked. Just because Catherine called time on their marriage didn’t mean it was easy to hear this news.
‘Rachel, we just celebrated a happily divorced ten years. Of course I’m sure. As long as he doesn’t let this nonsense interfere with the business.’
‘Right,’ Rachel said. ‘That’s the business you own with your soon-to-be-remarried ex-husband. Whose fiancée you hate. What could possibly go wrong there?’
‘It’ll be okay,’ said Catherine. With that, she got up and went to check on Sarah.
Rachel couldn’t exactly throw stones at Catherine while she had James to deal with at work. She just hoped Catherine wouldn’t end up mixing business with displeasure.
Not everyone got to ignore their exes when their tolerance ran out. Sometimes children, social circles, mortgages or, in Rachel’s case, office space, made it hard to just delete his contact details and make your friends promise to forget all about that dark period. And sometimes people, like Catherine and Richard, actually wanted to stay in each other’s lives. Not only that, they built an entire business model around the idea that other people did too.
It definitely wasn’t for everyone, Rachel thought as she followed Catherine down to the kitchen. But after last night’s date she had to admit that it might be for her.
She just knew that Catherine was going to be smug about that.
‘This looks delicious,’ Catherine said as Sarah dished up their dinner – a huge salad of grilled halloumi, rocket, blood oranges and olives – at their battered, beloved kitchen table. It was big and comfortable and never divulged the secrets they shared over it. Like the rest of the house, it had seen better decades.
‘So, I’ve been thinking about RecycLove.com,’ Rachel said.
‘Oh?’ Catherine gave away nothing.
‘Because your date was bad? I want details!’ cried Sarah as she slid a tray full of shiny white meringues into the oven.
‘Please, not while we’re eating,’ Rachel said.
‘How did you meet this guy?’ asked Catherine.
‘At the pub last Friday. But it was close to last orders so I didn’t talk to him that much.’
‘That’s what you get for going out with someone you don’t even know,’ said Catherine.
Instead of answering, Rachel dug her phone out, opened Twitter and shared his photo round the table.
‘Ah, I see.’ Catherine smiled.
‘Nice one,’ Sarah said. ‘He’s pretty. I’d overlook a lot to snog him.’
‘That’s what I figured too. We’ve been tweeting all week. Just jokey messages, mild flirtation. He suggested a drink near the office. He did seem normal at first. Until he started flirting.’ She grimaced.
‘But you’d been flirting with him on Twitter.’
‘Not like this. At first it was hot.’ Her face started to burn. This wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to confess, even to friends. ‘We started talking about what we’d do to each other … in the bedroom.’
‘Rachel!’ Sarah exclaimed. ‘You don’t even know him.’
‘Well, obviously, Sarah, at that point I was hoping to change that! It’s been a while, you know.’
Both women nodded. The only man who’d been in their house in the last six months had come to fix the boiler.
‘So I said something fairly tame like …’ She lowered her voice. So embarrassing. ‘Like I’d wear a body stocking. He said he’d like that. Then he asked if I’d wee on him while he wore the body stocking.’
‘Wow,’ Catherine said, keeping a straight face, Rachel noted. She probably had a tick box on the website for such fetishes.
‘That’s sick!’ Sarah said. ‘You should have reported him to the police.’
‘For what? Wanting to wee on me? It’s not a crime. The crime was that I didn’t just get up and leave. But it seemed rude not to finish my drink. That’s when it got really weird.’
‘That’s when it got weird?’ Catherine said.
‘Did he start punching himself?’ Sarah asked.
Rachel shook her head.
‘No, no punching …?’
Sarah’s mind worked in mysterious ways.
‘It’s just that wanting to be dominated probably comes from low self-esteem, maybe self-harm,’ Sarah continued.
Then again, Rachel thought, she was a clever woman. She just didn’t feel the need to fill the rest of them in on the steps in her thought process. Sometimes talking to her was like being paintballed from all sides.
‘So,’ Rachel continued. ‘I said that weeing on people wasn’t really my thing. And then he asked if I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my saviour. Because otherwise I was going to hell.’
‘Because you didn’t wee on him?’ Sarah asked. ‘That seems harsh.’
‘That’s when I left.’ She turned to Catherine. ‘If I join RecycLove.com can you promise I won’t have to wee on anyone?’
‘I can’t make any promises,’ Catherine said. ‘But it’s got to be better than meeting randoms in bars. You’re really thinking of joining?’
Rachel nodded. She couldn’t believe it had come to this. A decade ago when she was just out of uni she’d never have joined a dating site. It had been too easy to meet guys then, and anyway, online dating reminded her of those WLTM adverts that everyone laughed over in the back of the papers.
But now, unless she developed a fetish or was born-again, she might need RecycLove. ‘I’m afraid it’s time.’
‘That’s great, Rachel,’ Catherine said. ‘Who’ll join with you?’
‘James, of course. He owes me.’
